COLLAGE DADA JUKEBOX: THE ANIMATIONS OF RUN WRAKE

Filmforum is honored to pay tribute to Wrake’s singular work with a program featuring many of his short personal films along with a few examples of his eclectic commercial work for MTV, U2, and others. The program spans his widely praised student film Anyway (1990) — including his well-known masterstroke Rabbit (2005) — culminating with one of his final works, Down With the Dawn (2012), a hypnotic and unexpected piece made in direct response to his own initial cancer diagnosis.

Employing a radical, often exhilarating collage sensibility and an intuitive grasp of movement, metamorphosis, and the bizarre, British animator and designer Run Wrake forged an ever-forking path of innovation and influence in his work, spanning the early ’90s to his tragic passing in 2012.

Wrake found his way to animation via design and graphics, and very quickly defined a signature style which reflected an innate understanding of animation form and potential mixed with an interest in pop visual culture, collage aesthetics, and looping, all wrapped in a vivid envelope of the absurd.

The title of his award-winning 1990 Royal College of Art student film, Anyway, suggests Wrake’s fascination with the non-sequitur; despite the incredible diversity of stylistic variation throughout his work, perhaps the one constant is his ability to always keep viewers on their toes, absolutely never beginning to even guess what will happen next. His films have a highly defined internal logic and organic coherence to them which sits in strange comfort within the utter weirdness and unpredictability of their worlds. In his early work, bold graphics, incongruous textures, and the loaded visual language of mass consumerism writhe in rhythmic, repetitive dances along defined but wildly free associative paths. Beginning with Rabbit in 2005, Wrake moved into a more narrative mode, constructing dark, surrealistic tales, often from deliberately limited vocabularies of found visual material. Always committed to maintaining an output of personal works, these projects would manifest alongside and in between his copious commissions, music videos, and promo work.